IMAGINiT Geospatial Solutions Blog

The Future of VBA

Do you use VBA with AutoCAD Map 3D?

Or in any of the following products for that matter: AutoCAD, AutoCAD Architecture, AutoCAD MEP, AutoCAD Mechanical, or AutoCAD Electrical?

If yes, it is very important you read this information provided by Autodesk regarding the future of VBA.

Starting with the release of the 2010 Autodesk product family in late March, we are changing the way VBA is delivered to customers with AutoCAD, AutoCAD Architecture, AutoCAD MEP, AutoCAD Map 3D, AutoCAD Mechanical and AutoCAD Electrical. For these Autodesk products, VBA will no longer be delivered 'in the box' and will instead be available for customers to download and install upon demand at no cost from www.autodesk.com

When a customer first tries to use VBA, whether a VBA application they developed or when executing a VBA function in your application, they will be prompted to download and install the 'VBA module' (a 90mb download).

Note this is a first step toward the eventual removal of VBA from Autodesk products at some time in the future due to the fact of Microsoft stopping support for VBA two years ago, and the lack of "true" 64bit support for VBA. We encourage all VBA using developers to not write any new VBA code - and to use VB.NET instead to insure your code is "future proof".

Unitl next time, take care,
Warren M

Problems selecting points from an ODBC datasource in MapGuide

I've recently come across a situation where I was working on a new MapGuide application that contained an ODBC datasource to generate points on my map. The points displayed fine, but I could not 'select' the points on that layer?.

Now, for those that are un-aware, if you have a database that contains columns of coordinates, you can use the FDO ODBC Provider to automatically generate points based on those coordinates. Because this functionality is provided through FDO, this can be done in AutoCAD Map, MapGuide, and ANY of the Autodesk Geospatial products (Topobase, Civil 3D, AUD).

Let me say this again,
If you have points in a database, regardless of the database; Access, SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, etc., you need to use the ODBC FDO Provider to generate points in the drawing or MapGuide layer. A common misconception in this regard has been with SQL Server. Many people have tried to use the SQL Server Provider to generate points because their data resides in SQL Server, however this fails. The ODBC FDO Provider must be used.

So, back to the problem at hand.
Why can't select these points?!
I know I have other applications similar to this where I can select points?

And then it suddenly occurred to me that I have been seeing some emails lately around this topic on the mapguide-users list. The solution is a simple one: ensure that there is a Primary Key defined in the database table.

Although the solution is simple, I think this might be an architectural change in how the provider is handling the points. I need to confirm this, but I'm 99% sure that we have applications developed on previous versions of MapGuide that worked fine without specifying a PK. I guess I have some more work to do.

Another take-away from this post: if you are doing any development with MapGuide you should probably consider subscribing to the mapguide-users list, or if you don't want your mailbox flooded with these emails, you should at least know where to find the list archives online. To subscribe to the list go here, and to view the archives, go here

Until next time, take care,
Warren M

Welcome to the IMAGINiT Geospatial Blog

Welcome to the launch of the IMAGINiT Geospatial Blog. My name is Warren Medernach and I am a Geospatial Applciation Specialist with IMAGINiT Technologies located in our Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (52.161942, -106.665874) office. 

May passion is all things geospatial, and I have been in the Autodesk reseller channel for over 14 years where the last 10 years I have concentrated on the geospatial side of our business.

While I may be 'the face' of this blog, the content will be driven by many of my colleauges within the Geospatial space at IMAGINiT .

The purpose of this blog is to:

• Keep you updated on happenings in the Autodesk Geospatial world.
• Provide tips and tricks as related to the Autodesk Geospatial offerings..
• Provide information on ALL things Geospatial.

Today's tip is actually related to AutoCAD, but it has a special (or is it 'spatiial'?) meaning for Map as well...
Have you ever seen this 'marker thing' in some of your drawings, and you weren't sure what it was?

It probably annoyed you at first, and maybe you couldn't figure out how to turn it off, so you just ignored, and maybe now you don't even notice it?  Well, that marker is called the Geomarker, and it is a way to embed geographic location information into a drawing file.  This geographic information can be specified in a few ways: by importing a KML, or KMZ file with location information, use the Geographic locator dialog box in AutoCAD to specify location paramters, or import a location directly from Google Earth.

So why would you want, or need, to do this?
Well, a plain 'ol AutoCAD drawing does not actually 'know' where it is in relation to the real-world.  Even if the drawing content has been drawn based on a specific coordinate location (UTM, State Plane, LL or other), the drawing file itself still doesn't know that it is located anywhere specific.  In this case, it makes it difficult to properly georeference that data in other systems or applications.

Once the geographic location has been set, the geomarker will appear, and the drawing now has some 'geographic intelligence', and as such, can be referenced into other systems that do understand different coordinate systems.

I know that might have been a long-winded explanation, but if you simply want to turn off the symbol, there is a system variable called: GEOMARKERVISIBILITY.  Set this variable to 0, and voila, the marker is gone.

Stay tuned in the coming days for information on the upcoming release of AutoCAD Map 3D 2010

Until next time, take care,
Warren